Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (Cultural Memory in the Present)

"I think that Luhmann is the one precise genius within the social sciences alive this day. via this, I suggest that not just is he clever, tremendous efficient, and amazingly erudite, notwithstanding all this is often precise adequate, but in addition that he has, during an unbelievable occupation, elaborated a idea of the social that perfectly reinvents sociology and destroys its such a lot adored dogmas." So wrote Stephen Fuchs in his Contemporary Sociology evaluate of Luhmann's significant theoretical paintings, Social Systems (Stanford, 1995). during this quantity, Luhmann analyzes the evolution of affection in Western Europe from the 17th century to the present.

Reviews

"Luhmann's certain, enormous, theory-building attempt is healthier defined as a constant try and installation the instruments and the inspirations of 3 recommendations: glossy details conception, structuralism, and evolutionary concept. . . . maybe not anything conveys extra poignantly Luhmann's strange combination of medical precision with inventive sensibility than his substitute of Parson's 'reciprocity of viewpoint' along with his personal 'interpersonal interpenetration.' the 1st is cool, calculating, cognitive, and dispassionate; the second one connotes a richness of courting that leaves no human college unmoved. . . . Luhmann's paintings is critical simply because, arguably, it comes nearer than all different sociological ideas to restoring the misplaced hyperlink among academically respected social theorizing and the subjective event of life." —American magazine of Sociology

"There is a dearth of analytical writing concerning the feelings and sentiments that appear to encourage such a lot human motion, at the least in daily dialogue, even though a few researchers are making a few efforts to treatment this case. Luhmann's Love as Passion is an exceptional contribution to this rising pattern . . . jam-packed with novel info and interesting ideas." —Contemporary Sociology

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Serious conception emerged within the Twenties from the paintings of the Frankfurt college, the circle of German-Jewish teachers who sought to diagnose-and, if in any respect attainable, cure-the ills of society, relatively fascism and capitalism. during this e-book, Stephen Eric Bronner presents sketches of best representatives of the severe culture (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) in addition to lots of its seminal texts and empirical investigations.

Knowledgeable through a provocative exhibition on the Louvre curated by way of the writer, The Severed Head unpacks inventive representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic interval to the current. Surveying work, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed severe eye to a research of the pinnacle as image and metaphor, as spiritual item and actual truth, extra constructing a severe topic in her work--the strength of horror--and the possibility of the face to supply an event of the sacred.

This wide-ranging instruction manual provides in-depth discussions at the array of subspecialties that contain the sector of sociological idea. fashionable theorists operating in a number of traditions talk about methodologies and methods; the cultural flip in sociological theorizing; interplay procedures; theorizing from the systemic and macro point; new instructions in evolutionary theorizing; energy, clash, and alter; and theorizing from assumptions of rationality.